Rhythm
by bookmawkish
Summary: Loki is watching you as if you're something totally exterior to his sphere of reference. His lips are slightly parted as he breathes hard through his own pain, and there are little silvery scars, like threads, running along them. Loki X Reader/Reader POV.
1. Chapter 1

**Somewhere AU post New York. Was meant to be a oneshot, but got out of hand. I may write more. Do you think it's worth continuing?**

* * *

An impromptu party at Stark Tower. Because there's no way that could _possibly_ go wrong. Not until the speaker gets knocked over and Loki nearly breaks your neck, that is.

You're wearing your second-best outfit. This has been a deliberate ploy on your part: your best outfit is amazing but makes you feel like you're going to a funeral or your estranged cousin's wedding (which is, in fact, what you bought it for). You want to feel relaxed, comfortable, and thereby look much cooler.

At any rate, you needn't have bothered, because your second-best at a Stark party is hardly going to be noticed. Everyone there's either drunk out of their skull or so focused on the person they're trying to get into bed with that you could have shown up wearing fruit like Carmen Miranda and the most anyone would have said would have been "_Duuuuude! _Cool pineapple." A man walks past wearing something so shiny Liberace would have sucked his teeth in horrified admiration and you're probably the only one who winces.

The music thumps through your body, faster than your heartbeat, louder, stronger, and you remember what it is you're really here for. Music. Your love of the beat. The speakers flanking the stage are the size of the back end of an articulated lorry and right next to them the air seems to sizzle with the force of the rhythm. An eldritch blue-white light glimmers in their dials and switches. The magazines are often full of the exploits and inventions of the billionaire genius, but this is the one that really jumped out at you: a sound system that could blow the roof off Grand Central if you so much as played rock-a-bye-baby through it on a child's recorder.

You love music and everything it does to you. The way it worms into your brain and ties your soul up in knots; the way a simple syncopated beat can turn catchy into unforgettable; the way when you plug in your headphones on the subway the music becomes your world and paints your grey journey in rainbow colours. And the lyrics. Anyone who ever claimed good music lyrics aren't pure poetry was talking out of their ass.

So Tony Stark's newest baby, this Mack Truck beatbox that gives the music itself a physical presence around you in the floor, the air, the heat of the dance - you couldn't resist coming here. Stark's patently a half-strung super-social lunatic, and Facebook parties were made for him. Unlike most people, he's perfectly happy to invite 30,000 of his closest Facebook buddies (and_ their _closest buddies) to come down and party on a random Tuesday night.

You wonder, briefly, where he is.

Everybody here seems to be talking to someone, though you can't imagine how anything's being understood with the overwhelming, addictive beat, and behind the incredibly lengthy bar there are a number of wait staff flitting back and forth with complimentary drinks that probably cost more than your month's wages for a small glass. And that have a small sparkler in them that changes colour as it burns, which probably also cost a minor fortune.

You are too intimidated (and poor) not to take a glass of the peculiar stuff as it comes round on a tray. You don't even know what it is. It's green and smells as if someone's sprinkled raw pollen over it. There's also a growing whiff of ozone and gunpowder, which you are just starting to attribute to the sparkler, when the outer wall of the tower implodes in a cloud of rubble dust and acrid smoke. A body flies through it, backwards, and slams into the wall behind the stage with a crunch that's audible even over the music.

There's not that dramatic silence of shock, because the music is soaring, and the screams of the guests blend with the vocal track as they start to realise that maybe this wasn't part of the planned entertainment (you can never be sure with Stark) and you realise that the body picking itself up off the stage is tall and slender and boiling with suppressed fury.

And is Loki.

Loki. The god. The killer.

Beyond the immediate shock, the only thing your brain can come up with is that he's a lot better-looking than genocidal lunatics ought to be. Admittedly, he looks pissed as all hell as he sweeps to his feet and stares venomously at something behind you.

"OK," says the unmistakable voice with its synthesized twang, somehow perfectly audible over the music. "You're getting unfriended the minute we're done here, Harry Potter."

A blast of white-blue light slams past Loki's head, and he's ducking and moving with unbelievable, unnatural grace. He counters with a flare of lurid green energy which gouts from his hands like liquid fire. And Iron Man darts down from directly overhead, in hot pursuit.

You probably shouldn't stay standing where you are. Around you the other 29,000-odd people are starting to panic and surge for the exits, a tide of struggling, shoving, terrified bodies. But it's all happening in what feels like slow motion, and the music thrums through you even as Loki's terrible (magic?) sears the floor and the drapes and everything starts to burn. Loki's face is lit by flickering firelight and the neon flares of Iron Man's blasters: and it can't be your imagination that now there's a brilliant, exhilarated glee in his expression. He bares his teeth, big and white like a wolf's, and this time it's unmistakable. He's grinning even as he almost gets flattened by a falling piece of masonry. That grin snares you, the fascination of the rabbit with the coils of the snake. Loki is so crazy he's drunk-high on being fought and fighting in return.

So, rabbit-in-the-headlights, you watch Stark and Loki trade blows, blind to everything but the pair of them, deaf to everything but the humming rhythm as, against all odds, your favourite song starts to play through Stark's ludicrously outsize speakers. Loki lashes out with a gesture and a magic-laced, non-English word: Iron Man staggers from where he's braced himself up against the bar, smoke curling up his arms. There's a moment of almost comical respite as he flings out a gauntleted hand and lethal energy fails to blast Loki in the face; Loki laughs, head thrown back but soundless in the roar of the music, and Stark spends precious seconds waggling his wrist, peering into the now evidently powerless hub of his palm blaster.

"Hardball. OK," he shrugs, after a moment, and puts his shoulder down like a quarterback, charging Loki full-tilt. He passes you by barely a meter, smelling of hot metal and burning, which is when you realise that the crush of panicking partygoers has pushed you dangerously close to the fight. You're almost flush against one of the two huge speakers.

Your favourite song hits the middle eight just as that speaker, caught a glancing blow in the fight, begins to rock and topple. It falls like a monolith, like an ancient stone circle dolmen, and still you can't move. You stare up at the approaching slab, the beat pulsing in your ears and vibrating your vision to a blur. Killed by music. Not a bad way to go, your fracturing thoughts murmur.

But an arm snakes around your neck and yanks you sideways at the critical moment. The speaker crashes to the floor and everything shudders at its demise. You exhale in a gasp of relief and then extend to a hiss of pure fright as you realise that the arm holding you is wearing leather, not metal.

Loki has you by the throat in a choke-hold and he's pressing you up against the front of his body like a shield. Your neck burns with the strain of being pulled. In the sudden silence caused by the speaker's fall you feel almost deaf, but against your back Loki's heartbeat takes up the rhythm. You can feel his chest (and he's breathing hard from exertion) shoving at your spine. He's saved you: without him you'd be dead. And yet somehow there's no room for gratitude alongside your growing dread - what exactly has he saved you _for?_


	2. Chapter 2

Stark pulls up his next charge and stops dead, a short distance away. The Iron Man suit is scorched, battered and scraped like a car on demolition derby day and you can hear in the new quiet the creak of metal under strain. Loki pulls you tighter against him, and his unexpected strength is terrifying. He's built slim but grips like a wrestler. You couldn't move if you tried. Your own blood thumps nauseatingly through your ears and head, an alarmingly fast beat, but right now you cling onto its sheer normality of the rhythm because everything else around you is going mad.

"Drop," says Stark, as if he's talking to a naughty puppy, one finger gesturing at you. Loki's answering laughter hums through your body, making all the hairs at the nape of your neck stand on end. He shakes his head, hugging you closer, strands of his dark hair sticking to your cheek. Unsurprisingly, you're sweating. He smells like spice, sharp, like coriander. You've never been this close to anyone who wasn't your mother or your lover. It isn't comfortable. "C'mon," Iron Man continues, in what you feel is an unnecessarily pally way given the circumstances. "Give it up. Don't make me tell big bro on you. I hate snitches."

"Ohhh," purrs Loki, and his fingers dig into your shoulder in a painful massaging caress, "but Thor would be so _pleased_ to hear I was following his example and taking up with a mortal."

Iron Man's expression is, of course, unreadable behind the helmet. It's all in the body posture and the head-tilt with him. His current stance suggests deliberate ease and a confidence you'd suspect he didn't feel, had he been anyone but Tony Stark.

"Yuh-huh. There's taking up and taking up. This? This is called _hostage_-taking. Not blind dating. Big difference. Now let go."

Loki's free hand slides down your body and, before you really realise what's happening, inside your second-best outfit. Horrified confusion and more than a little fright grips you until you realise that he's doing nothing more than checking you for weapons. His hand slips down your ribs, along your flank, under your arms. The touch is precise, purposeful and firm, but not in the least gentle. Nothing to be found except your money and your phone. The rest of your stuff, coat included, is in the check room and for usefulness purposes might as well be on Mars - not that there was anything useful to be had in there anyway. It's not like you went out for the evening loaded with a pre-packed hostage survival kit and a takeout bento box. Loki plucks out the phone anyway and casts it aside. Possibly he doesn't know what these things are for, or maybe where he comes from there's some particular stigma attached to sharing photos of chicken ramen with others. Regardless, your last contact with normality is gone as the phone clatters into a corner.

"No, I think I'll keep this one," Loki says, and Stark jolts forward a step, metal joints whirring. Loki clicks his tongue warningly, tutting, and you feel the arm circling your neck abruptly tighten like the coils of a python. You choke, writhing, your feet skittering back to hit and trample upon the toes of Loki's boots. Loki doesn't seem to notice. His heart rate is actually slowing, calming, as he feels himself regaining control of the situation. You can hear his breathing steady and flatten, and his calm is far more frightening than his fury had been. There's an honesty in rage that you can appreciate. Anger is very human, and you're human.

Except that to you, Loki has never seemed more inhuman than he does right now, calming and relaxing in the middle of a standoff with a hostage beating the hell out of his calves with their feet. Even with you snared invasively close to him he manages to seem vastly distant. Cold. The only warmth is that of his body against your back. He seems to be growing warmer, or maybe it's you growing colder as your air supply runs out.

Air. Heartbeat. In and out, _thump-thump,_ in and out. The smell of spice from Loki's body. Air. _Thump-thump._ There's nothing left to you except that most instinctive of actions, the things your body does by itself. Air. Heartbeat. _Thump-thump. _

Pause.

_Thump._

Your feet, beating uselessly against Loki's legs, fall limp.

The sight of Iron Man leaping forward blurs as your consciousness starts to fade. Then, just as you're about to black out, pain shoots through your knees and your vision explodes back into life. You almost wish it hadn't.

Loki is turning to dodge Stark's charge, and he's swinging you like a doll to keep your body between him and the Avenger. Your knees have just smacked hard into the edge of the fallen speaker as he turns and you cry out as the pain really starts to set in. Dimly, in relief, you feel your toes curl inside your shoes. Nothing broken, most likely, but lord, does it hurt. But you can breathe again, so you do, in a great whoop of desperation, and Loki, backed up against the stage now, holds you so that the most of your body is covering his. The full connotations of the phrase "human shield" leave a bad taste in your forebrain as they pass.

It's been in your mind before: thinking about what would happen if someone tried to mug you, car-jack you. You're not the sort of person who hangs about waiting to be rescued, or at least you liked to think so. Facing death now (or possibly worse, you've no idea what Loki has in mind for you) has given your self-image a nasty edge of clarity. You just don't have what it takes to fight this. And what's worse is that you never did. Gods or human monsters: you don't have it in you. You're a victim and you always have been.

You wonder if Loki knew this, in the way that the lion can look at a thousand zebra and immediately single out the lame one.

Your shoes scrape the expensive floor, dragging trails through the spilt green drinks and rubble from the wall. Loki is backing further up along the edge of the stage, pulling you with him, his breath on your neck. Iron Man's glowing eyes are on you, flat, seeming empty. He doesn't take a step to follow, though you try to plead with him using only your expression. Your throat aches from Loki's grip and you suspect that even should you try to speak, all that would come out would be a whisper.

"You know, I didn't think you were this stupid," comes the voice from the Iron Man mask, and there's a hint of genuine sadness. A genius often appreciates intellect in others: Stark sounds as if he found a dime and lost a dollar. "This doesn't end here."

Loki grins, a flash of those predatory teeth. "You always say that," he says, almost lovingly. "I think I'd miss it if you stopped."

And he turns, leaps with you through the blasted hole in the outer wall before you even have time to think the fatalistic words: how high up are we?


	3. Chapter 3

"You've got a car."

It's a statement rather than a question. His accent is not like yours. He sounds incredibly, overstatedly British. _Downton Abbey _British. Except you didn't think the Brits were that into leather and kidnapping. Maybe you were wrong. Maybe London's a hotbed of fast gods and cheap kinks.

Your mind's wandering and not into helpful places. He shakes you, like a terrier shakes a rat. Your voice is a croak.

" I took the subway."

He huffs out a breath and continues to drag you. Your body doesn't seem to be working properly, but that's hardly surprising, given that -

Falling. You're beyond terror.

There's too much to take in and because you know you're going to die, your mind's in a frenzy, trying to suck into itself the last seconds, squeeze every drop of experience out of them before the finality of the sidewalk. The open air feels cold and your eyes (tears?) watering blurs everything further into confusion.

Falling.

Turns out you were fairly high up. Not at the top, which in a weird way might have been better, but quite high all the same. Once inside the building, you'd quite lost track of location in the hum of the beat, the thronging, packed hallways and elevators and endless, elegant rooms. The music had drawn you in, pulled you to the centre and held you there in its sway, as always. You could have been anywhere - on the Moon, in Paris, in a basement. All that had mattered was to be there and to be part of the party.

Loki leaps into the void as calmly as if he's jumping rope in the park and the sudden solid reality of location hits you. Quite high up. Quite high up can mean views, vantage and status: but _quite high up _is always accompanied by its gleefully morbid partner, _quite a long way down_.

You may have screamed. You're quite likely to have done, and no-one would judge you for it. Loki doesn't make a sound. His arm has shifted down to snag you around the chest, and it's crushing, but that no longer matters because any moment now you're going to be dead.

Still, your body has other ideas, other more basic survival instincts. It screams. It clings and scrabbles. It doesn't want to die. At the last, as you can sense rather than see the ground rushing up to meet you, you turn your face into Loki's body and grip onto him as if he's the last thing that can save you. The hard edges of the leather press into your cheek and your fingers dig hard into his collar.

Your primal survival instincts, as it turns out, are good.

The impact is purely ridiculous, in a cartoon way. There's no previous experience in your life that can give it context. You've flown before, and experienced the g-force on takeoff and landing. You've fallen from the apex of a swing's parabola as a child. You've been taken down, last man standing, in a hail of acrylic at paintball. This is really nothing like any of them, but a little of all.

As the sidewalk lurches sickeningly close, Loki swings you again, bringing his legs under himself, bending, bracing. His knees smack up under your spine as you hit, his torso arching over yours. There's a sound that you only realise much later was the sidewalk cracking in several places, like it was peanut brittle. This scares you, once you work it out. You're stuck with someone who is tough enough to crack concrete and not crack his own bones doing it. His stupidly resilient Asgardian body has acted like a car's suspension and rollcage: you're bounced around, bruised, whiplashed and winded, but you're still alive.

_Why?_

Crazily, the first sound you can make sense of is a parked car's stereo system. It's playing a song by Muse and the familiar intro bars give you an odd sort of comfort. Then into the familiar refrain comes the wail of sirens, and from above the super-and-sub-sonic whine of the Iron Man suit. You feel Loki exhale and uncurl from his crouch around you. Around you, there are people: the streets are never empty.

"_Fuck, _man," says a deep voice, from behind you. "Some party." More voices, cutting in, making only snatches of sense.

"You OK?"

" - need an ambulance -"

" - all the way up there, isn't it a -"

" - recognise that guy -"

" - isn't that -"

" - shit, he was on the news -"

Loki's name hits the crowd like a stone dropped into a lake. The ripples spread out as he stands, dragging you with him, and he looks up at Tony Stark's graceful descent, bathing in the blues and twos as more cars approach.

Someone takes a photo. Then another. Someone videoing. The camera phones flash and flicker in Loki's eyes as he darts looks side to side, turning his green irises to reflective red, like a cat's eyes in the dark.

You swear to God that if you get out of this you'll never use your own phone to record stuff that happens in the street ever again. It's insane, an affront to your own fright and desperate situation. You're gripped with an abrupt, numb hatred of these people who seem to think your impending death is some kind of tourist attraction. Had you been less in shock and more your normal self, you'd have felt unbearably exposed.

The scream of Iron Man's boosters sounds from above, and the air around you suddenly suffuses with the spice-market smell you're already starting to associate with Loki, and there's a moment when the air seems to flicker, fog with cinnamon shades, before clearing again.

"Hey," says the original deep voice, which belongs to a guy wearing a baseball cap backwards and a designer shirt. "Holy -! Where'd they go?"

The growing crowd hums uncertainly. They draw back, murmuring, and Loki moves as they move, slipping into the growing gaps, unbelievably silent despite the boots. You're in pain and you yelp as he jolts you. His only response is to clamp his hand over your mouth and he keeps moving.

Behind you, Stark's boots hiss and there's a ker-_thunk_ as he lands in the centre of the cracked sidewalk. Bumping along with Loki as he slides between cars in the rubbernecking jam building up, you only catch glimpses and you can't understand what's happening. It's like the moment just after the speaker fell: you feel strangely half-deaf, unreal. People are looking everywhere but at you and the focus of everyone is now on Iron Man and the cracks in the pavement.

And this is how you and Loki disappear, under a cloak of magic (another thing that belatedly dawns on you once you're feeling less concussed). He's determined, it seems, to go on the run, and you're going with him.

"You've got a car."

"I took the subway."

This doesn't stop the newspaper headlines, for days afterwards, being convinced that you took your car anyway. And by that time, you're both long gone.


	4. Chapter 4

You've never felt more like an accessory in your life, for a couple of reasons.

First of all, you've just fled the scene of a crime (you can't entirely work out what the crime would be classified as, but figure it starts with destruction of property and works up from there) and while you may have started off as a definite victim, your doing a moonlight flit with the principal villain will at least raise doubts with the powers that be.

You're not stupid. You know how the media works.

Secondly, which feels worse in a strange sort of way, you're being dragged along and generally swung about like a battered shoulder bag. And not the fashionable kind - distressed is a good look on jeans and leather coats. It's not a good look on you.

Loki evidently cares about the condition of his shoulder bag even less than he cares about heights. Your tongue feels thick in your mouth, where you suspect you have bitten it during the descent. Your knees are screaming pain at you with every bend of your legs and jolt of your steps, which is why you're being dragged. Walking is proving difficult. And you can still feel the bruised constriction of Loki's arm around your throat, even though he's now got his hand dug into your scruff like a belligerent lioness moving her cub.

As you focus on the hard grip of his fingers on the back of your neck and head, something foreign and cold in the back of your mind murmurs ___[skoft]_in that ___Downton Abbey _accent, but you're so weary and dull with injuries you barely take notice. Hindsight will prove marvellous.

He hasn't asked your name, and you certainly don't need to ask his. You both just keep moving. The world around you is a cardamom scented blur of people, cars, buildings, all coloured by your pain. The sound and sense of emergency vehicles fades as time and distance passes. The black plume of smoke rising from Stark Tower begins to recede behind the horizon of high-rises. Once, far overhead, a chopper passes in a curving diagonal. The deep thrum of those circling rotors sets up a vibration in your bruised body that's just on the benevolent side of painful, and you're almost sorry when it passes beyond the block and is gone.

It occurs to you later that this reaction, part of your addiction to the beat, is probably something psychologists would have a field day with. They'd go right back to the primal: the heartbeat of your mother, the safety of the womb, and all manner of peculiar earth-mother-wind-and-fire shit.

You don't feel you'd have a lot of time for this. A chopper's scything rotors are not your mother. The hum of speakers does not move you, claim you, because it makes you feel safe.

Quite the opposite, in fact.

And there's a new rhythm, a new unsafe beat to live by: the stumbling of your feet, the quick tread of Loki's boots. And despite the peril, even this becomes something you almost enjoy. Every second you keep moving is a second he hasn't killed you. Every second you keep moving is a second he hasn't decided you're useless. Because you're pretty certain that useless things of Loki's don't just get discarded. They get destroyed, just in case they should become useful to anyone else.

Loki shifts the grip of his fingers on your neck, like a guitarist shifting chord. He's slowing down and your watering eyes rove from side to side. The blur of scenery passing by around you seems more dusty green and brown and yellow than clean city greys and reds. The smell of spices that surrounds you both has taken on a sour tang, as if someone is burning powdered cumin on an overly hot skillet. It's also reminding you a little of the smell you get when you boil a saucepan dry. Running on fumes. How far have you gone?

You haven't actually asked him anything. Where would it get you? In movies and fiction captives are always demanding answers. ___What time is it? Where am I? What do you want with me? How could you? Where are you taking me? Do you want money? When are you going to let me go?_

Now that you're in their exact situation you genuinely can't understand why they do this. It only ever antagonises, or worse, prods the villain into revealing more than they wanted to. At which point they're more likely to kill you because you know their plans and are a risk.

You're painfully aware that every train of thought you're having is ending up n your death. Given what's going on, this probably shows a healthy grasp of realism.

Against your skin, Loki's fingertips shudder, just the tiniest amount. Another sound joins the creak of leather clothing, the drag of your feet, the rapid tread of his boots. His breathing. Laboured breathing, bordering on a gasp. Steady, but ragged. A new syncopation in the rhythm, shifting with an accent to weakness.

It's only then you start to realise you're probably not the only one who's injured.

Somewhere inside you once again hear that voice, a new word ___[sárr],_ and there's a phantom pain gnawing at your gut. It feels like there's a huge snake curled around inside your intestines, like there's a giant wolf with its teeth meeting in the soft parts of your abdomen -

Eyes that are not your eyes are burning and so very ___[sárr!] _painful.

___What the hell -?_

Loki suddenly stops moving forward and the world stops rushing around you in a blur. You would have dropped like a rag doll had it not been for his hand on the back of your neck. As it is, he holds you there upright, glaring fiercely at the point where his hand meets your neck, as if the very fact of his having to touch you offends him.

He's remarkably pale, with livid exertion spots slashing along his cheekbones and making them look almost bruised. You look everywhere except directly into his eyes. The chased leather that covers his chest, battered and scorched, moving in and out as he breathes hard. The dirty, flicking ends of his black hair moving against the sky. The heavy way the tails of his tunic are lifted by the breeze and fall back to hit the sides of his boots. The boots themselves.

He shakes you warningly, like a terrier shakes a rat, then drops you, before dropping to the ground himself.


	5. Chapter 5

When you look back on it later, now would have been a really good time to run. The best time, actually, before the birds and the weirdness really kicked in. There are only a couple of problems with this.

One: had you been expressly ordered to by the President, the baby Jesus, and your mom, you wouldn't have been able to get your legs working enough to even stagger.

So you stay there on the ground in a half-sprawl, trembling with strain, but unwilling to lapse down into being fully prone. It would be too vulnerable a position and you have no idea where the hell you are. If he's chosen to drop you in the middle of the freeway you could shortly become more prone than any living human being can comfortably be and they'd be scraping your intentions to escape (along with the rest of you) up with a shovel.

Two: Loki is conscious and watching you like a hawk. You've often thought that was an odd choice of phrase - you saw a bald eagle in a zoo once and it had a certain mad-eyed vacancy to its expression that didn't lend itself to being thought intelligent or keen.

But with this all this inhuman attentiveness fixed on you now, you completely get it.

And _shit_, you looked him in the eye. And now you can't look away. He's lying in a position almost mirroring you, propped on his arms, not letting himself slump, his legs splayed behind him. And staring, his expression unreadable.

There was that bit you read in _The Silence Of the Lambs _where the mother of the kidnapped girl does a thing with the press asking the kidnapper to hand himself in. She used the girl's name a lot, because that was supposed to do - what was it? - personalisation. Get the criminal to see the girl as a person, not an object. Another human being, a soul, a life. Someone he couldn't just kill.

Loki is watching you as if you're something totally exterior to his sphere of reference. His lips are slightly parted as he breathes hard through his own pain, and there are little silvery scars, like threads, running along them. Your throat hurts, and your mouth is dry. Your tongue feels swollen and moves sluggishly as you try to speak.

He frowns at your first attempt, possibly because he can't hear your damaged whisper.

You try again, and you tell him your name, which only strikes you as being a mistake after you've managed to choke it out past your thick tongue and dry lips.

Personalisation might work with another human being. Might. But what you've basically just done here is tried to say to a god "Look at me! I'm just like you! See how much we have in common! You wouldn't hurt me, wouldya, ol' buddy, ol' pal?"

Your heart hammers in your throat. Loki continues to frown, delicately, the lines on his brow drawing together above his long, elegant nose. Until, abruptly, the expression clears.

He repeats your name back to you, sarcastic, incredulous, his tone giving it all the _is-that-supposed-to-mean-something-to-me _he can muster.

And something happens.

That's the best you've both got, it seems.

_Something. _

It feels a bit like what happened when you stood directly in front of Stark's speaker. An external vibration, except that there's no noticeable source. So powerful it throws your heart off-beat, a palpitating, unhealthy fluttering that is in no way romantic and makes you feel sick. You only realise you're not having a heart attack when you catch the open-mouthed intensity on Loki's face, and realise it's having an impact on him, too.

You hear voices in your head, all talking in that weird language you don't recognise but somehow can catch the gist.

One of them, you realise now, the voice that had said scruff _[skoft] _and expressed pain _[sarr!] _is Loki's.

The other is an older man. You have no idea what he looks like, but his voice sounds broad and portentous and powerful. And angry.

Somewhere a few feet from your ear, a bird makes a shriking, ugly sound, and both you and Loki turn to look, snapping back to what passes for your reality these days and out of that _something_.

It's a fuck-off massive black bird with a beak that looks just made for digging into eye sockets. You've never seen one so big. It eyeballs both of you and gives a gutteral croak that sounds on the edge of being a word.

And Loki _laughs_.

It's not a comforting sort of laugh, or the crazy bloodlust grin from Stark Tower. This is almost resignation: the laugh of someone who's suddenly got the joke, and thinks it's neither very funny nor in very good taste. You have no idea what's funny _[hlaeja] _or what the hell is going on.

There's blood on the ground underneath where Loki is sitting, big drops in the dust. The big bird takes wing with a dusty rustle of feathers, and joins another, almost as big. They fly up together and perch on a telegraph wire across the street.

It's really only then that you bother to realise that you're somewhere way out in the suburbs, practically the boonies, on a sidewalk next to a car that doesn't look like it's moved in about 3,000 years (and that was to go pick up more rust at the rust store) and that there's an old guy with his t-shirt all covered in car grease just wandering out of his garage towards you both. He's just a guy: his hair is thinning, his bald patch is sunburnt, and he has a belly hanging over the belt on his blue jeans.

"Well, hi," he says, as soon as he gets within range. "Help you folks?"

He's particularly giving Loki the hard eye, which isn't surprising given the outfit. "Look like you've got yourself a good battering, young fella -"

Just like that, you can feel the balance of the situation shift. And as the guy reaches down to give Loki a hand up and Loki reaches out, smiling, to take it, you open your mouth and try to say "No!"

Quick as a snake, Loki grabs his arm, pulls hard. You have only time to lean your body away as he brings the man crashing onto the dusty street, arm first.

And there's a dull, almost non-noise as he breaks the guy's neck with an elbow brought down expertly.

You find you're empty. You want to be horrified, but you're not. You want to be able to do something, but there's nothing to be done. The guy's eyes stare up at you, bulging a little, and quite dead.

There is effort, weariness and a sneer on Loki's face. He pauses, just briefly, eyes closed, then pushes upright, towering above you, backlit by the sun. A hot scent like coriander suffuses the air and a few more spots of blood hit the street.

"Get the keys," he says. There's no hint of any expectation of disobedience.

You finally find them inside the old guy's back pocket, attached to a faded leather key fob.

"Get in the car."

It's a 1958 Plymouth Fury, or was, under the rust, with ridiculous fins, and it smells like something crawled in and died under the aging upholstery. It hurts when you bend your knees to get into the seat, but the relief to be sitting on supportive padding to rest your spine is greater.

A weight abruptly drops the back of the car down: Loki's doing something with the trunk that you can't see. When he climbs into the seat next to you, he winces a little and licks his lips.

You hope, when he makes you put in the keys and start the thing up for him, that he knows how to drive.


End file.
